¬ however it was was more fun when it was [real] spam but that can be considered unwelcome or maybe we are done with email more or less ¬ i enjoyed it but as so few had any time to reply or could not find the time to use the learned skills and play or just did not want to ⁄ this here ¬ a few were therethen [anon][critter][ccox][czyz]

Learning (unbooked) EMPATHY or suggesting it or mentioning it in relation to design ⁄ if design foundations ⁄ schooled fundamentals ⁄ maybe a study of time and duration will cover that and VALUES and beg more than sympathies. Faster now. What will we edit here and critcise as impractical?

( … )

UG ⁄ BA ⁄ making form meaning > GRAD ⁄ MA ⁄ compound system complex > PHD ⁄ prescient ontological change
This is backwards, right? No, it is more simultaneous, continuous. So the sequence and accompanying diagram is for housekeeping purposes, right? Exactly, but we will get there ⁄ it takes time and we have to learn how to teach it. That is learn it, right? [slight squint approaching a wince as in lack of recognition in the speaker’s validity or understanding and certain shift away from team colors, error]

( … )

If I had missed the 90s, I really would have missed something.

In the 90s there were folk that showed up to design conferences costume-wearing rain boots who gave talks while using the forms they studied ⁄ ponder that ⁄ design folk living form! They showed diagrams of things that looked seemingly impossible, worked at learning the digital and virtual metaphors, and smacked chunks of wood with hammers.

We’uns ⁄ some of us’ns ⁄ sat around graduate seminars pointing at literary theory and stumbling around half seeing another idea. An idea playing at/as something sort of complete — an unedited, fuller form, a form we need now. A form that connects directly to the way we live and learn outside of common experience and routine and the excuse of practicality.

Design ⁄ that Vital type ⁄
& that time when Graphic Design had an Idea
yep, the 90s

Those design folk playing with form and language went on to teach or start schools or curate or tire ⁄ maybe they found hot yoga or crafts or both. Then the value added folk showed up with e-businessing and e-worlding and before you knew it graphic design and its cousins went from interaction design to experience to service and then to everything ⁄ redesign of civilization and the ontological gulp. This is really the redesign of the human, but one has to start somewhere and we haven’t figured out the way to wrangle the human who, after all reason, excuse, and greater being are spent, confesses the tie-ending fact, “I don’t want to.”

In the 90s we did print and interaction and put images in sequence with time and lifted sound. Those of us who did all that and went on to teach tried to fuse it all or we stagnated or got busy with life or never got the timely lessons of those years. Transmedia was enough. Trans-routine, trans-duration, trans-experience was sort of still an act played out in the books written or the talks given in character, galoshes or not.

During the last twenty or so years, design has been hyphenated with every discipline known to the university as it has swung from this to that but ever-increasingly to more and now all. Phrases “like not ready to know” are batted around by academic types who claim-sit decade after decade at the origin ⁄ that zero axis times two on the personality grid. Changing behavior, intervention strategies, and the cognitive/neuro/bio-synth plays Twister for show as books and lectures point, but lives stay static on their known paths, linear, safe, predictable, clawfoot-tubbed, tooth-brushed, and Rx-ed.

( … )

So folk were acting and exploring form far more then ⁄ they seemed to believe in form or at least play with it outside of cute circuits of rehashed rendering and delighting. Now we have a few more brain metaphors, talk about changing behavior, and still point at form as though it is a chair or poster, movie or website ⁄ something, not someone.

We focus on design and anthropology, design and ecology, design and being more aware — some hint at transition to new ways of living and the political, ontological examination of design and practiced life. And some still teach design as though it is 1978 and they are special; appointed, anointed to pass on something ⁄ I am not sure what ⁄ by art directing a generation of students who could live and learn far better if just left alone in a group in any common space with time and each other.

We are at the point where all the talk of experience and form and changing behavior must come to mean something more than pointing words. If it is learning anew and becoming other or merely looking toward a reasonable transition, then it seems it is best time it be embodied, experienced ⁄ learned in the flesh. Not just the day job, comfort routines.

I was thinking this way several years ago but knew it more intuitively. I gave a lecture at a design school in Pittsburgh and quoted Thomas Berry. Barely knowing his ethos, let alone his work, I read from the beginning of his chapter: Reinventing the Human, from The Great Work ⁄ Our Way Into the Future.

A few nights ago a podcast talked about philosophers and ethics ⁄ what they say and what they do. High-minded and validated thoughts did not match their lifestyle. Best not to eat mammals but in action, a nice thought not realized. “I don’t want to.” As I have found this is the beat-all when it comes to the human. There really is little beyond this excuse, exclamation, and end. It is just too good to hold onto a life of taste, comfort, safety, and routine ⁄ one run by a level of stimuli that would fill 20 lives and easily end one.

If meandering in larger circles then only to approach a map rendered in one-to-one scale ⁄1:1⁄.